My summer trip entry ideas are now trickling in as opposed to pouring, and my memories are starting to fade. From now on, this blog will probably focus mostly on my meals to come here in Los Angeles. While I'll still wax nostalgic about an Asian meal here or there as they come to me, I wanted to post a kind of summing-up entry into which all my favorites are stuffed. And then ranked.
These are my top dishes. I can still taste each and every one of them like they're sitting on my tongue right now. Six of them made me cry right there in public in a strange country even though everyone was already staring at me because I'm blonde and have six inches on everyone.
Clicking on a dish links to an individual entry when applicable. I have done my best to drop a pin near the right location in Google Maps as I remember it so that you may drop everything, get on a plane, and fly out to these rare gems while you can! I do this because addresses are often nonexistent or meaningless, and place names are invisible, in strange script, or irrelevant. But please remember that this is Asia, things pop up and blink out of existence in the snap of a finger, and I cannot be responsible for anyone's wasted $1500 plane ticket in search of a 3 buck grilled fish (however much I support the principle of the search, and I do).
Top Ten Best Dishes:
1. Laotian grilled fish, Ruili, Yunnan, China - 25 kuai ($4) - map
2. Sushi Dai, Tsukiji, Tokyo, Japan - 3900 yen ($39) - map
3. Com hen, District 1, HCMC, Vietnam - 48000d ($2.50) - map
4. Ốc bông me, chem chép mỡ hành , District 1, HCMC, Vietnam - 100000d ($5) - map
5. Ruili crabs, Ruili, Yunnan, China - 40 kuai ($5.50) - map
6. Bò lá lốt, Binh Tan District, HCMC, Vietnam - 91000d ($4.50) - map
7. 'Potato' chips, special mountain veg, stirfry eggplant, tofu with water spinach, Weishan, Yunnan, China - 24 kuai ($4) - map
8. Roast street fish with lotus and quail egg xiaokao, Ruili, Yunnan, China - 20 kuai ($3.25) - map
9. Pork rib ramen, Osaka, Japan - 700 yen ($7) - map
10. Shrimp tempura platter, Tanabe, Japan - 800 yen ($8) - map
Showing posts with label Cambodia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cambodia. Show all posts
Friday, October 25, 2013
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Snacking across Asia, part III: Vietnam and Cambodia
(... continued from Part II.)
Oftentimes in Vietnam, the lines were blurred on what was a meal and what was a snack. Fully 90% of my meals took place planted on an ankle-high stool in a street somewhere, cost less than $2, and took only a few minutes out of my day while I slurped up the fist-size chunk of noodles or wrapped odds and ends in lettuce, basil, and mint leaves. Were these meals or snacks? Sometimes I ate five of them a day, but was that because of their diminutive size or my Vietnamese food gluttony?
Another peculiarity of Vietnam was that its best snacks were often technically drinks. On every heat-drenched corner was a maze of stands selling rau má (pennywort juice), nước mía (sugarcane juice), nước ép (fruit juice) and sinh tố (fruit shakes). The sinh tố was where things could get wild, making use of fruits as diverse as durian and jackfruit, mango, tomato, pineapple, squash, kumquat, soursop, avocado and sapodilla (a fruit I knew only as the Vietnamese 'sapoche' until this very second, when I looked up the English translation).
Keeping this in mind,
1. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Sinh tố
Making sinh tố is far from an exact science, and the proportions vary slightly by stand, but the recipe for a Vietnamese smoothie is, roughly, as follows:
Scoop edible portion of fruit into blender
Grab can of condensed milk; glop a ton of it into the blender on top of the fruit
Grab sugar jug and make it snow on top of the fruit and milk
Add ice
Blend
Even though I watched this process at least 50 times over my four weeks in Vietnam, and fully expected every time that my smoothie should taste like sugar and milk, it magically never did. It always tasted like someone liquefied and concentrated my favorite fruit and put it directly on my tongue. Durian shakes were appropriately stinky and retained a nice bit of custardy texture, while the jackfruit versions thankfully cut out their hint of slime. Avocado shakes made my American palate forget that avocados were meant for guacamole and savory dishes, not sweet ones (I told a smoothie-hawker once that Americans ate avocado only with salty things and she laughed so hard she knocked over a whole pineapple she was about to slice). I don't like sapodilla much, so it was entirely appropriate for me to think that the shake version tasted like rotten avocados.
Sinh tố was, if not the centerpiece of many photos, at least in the background, fueling the photographer.
2. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: "Bánh Mì"
Bánh mì (sandwich) shops are almost as omnipresent as sinh tố stands, but I was surprised to see them pop up from time to time in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian version, name unknown (as Khmer script is all loops to me) was half the size, coated with fiery red sauce and a heavy, pudding-like paté that tasted almost fermented, and had crunchy pork skins scattered across the top instead of head cheese.
3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: banana-filled rice
This five-cent snack came from a griddle full of its twins run by an old lady sitting across from the Chinese Embassy. Unadulterated, nothing but a grill-blackened pad of rice surrounding a lava-hot, sticky flow of ripe banana. I'm surprised the rest of the tropics haven't caught on!
4. Everywhere: Quail eggs
They come hardboiled; they come as balut. They come wrapped up pretty in little quail-egg-sized bags, tied with a ribbon. A ribbon! Inside the ten-egg packet is an even smaller packet of chili-spiced salt that is stapled closed. Their vendors cycle through the street and wend their way between tables at seafood, barbecue, and hotpot restaurants. I'd stop them on the sidewalk on my way home, hand them the equivalent of 25 cents, and go home with a bag of eggs to painstakingly peel and eat sprawled out on my hotel bed.
5. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Bánh chuối
Down the street from our last hotel was a tiny grocery which we never entered. We never entered it because its bakery was outside, and it had perfect round spheres of blackened banana pastry all ready for us to order from the sidewalk. The proprietor would slice a big fat triangle of jiggling cake-pudding hybrid into a plastic bag at night, and it would warm to breakfast temperature in the hot room by morning.
Oftentimes in Vietnam, the lines were blurred on what was a meal and what was a snack. Fully 90% of my meals took place planted on an ankle-high stool in a street somewhere, cost less than $2, and took only a few minutes out of my day while I slurped up the fist-size chunk of noodles or wrapped odds and ends in lettuce, basil, and mint leaves. Were these meals or snacks? Sometimes I ate five of them a day, but was that because of their diminutive size or my Vietnamese food gluttony?
Another peculiarity of Vietnam was that its best snacks were often technically drinks. On every heat-drenched corner was a maze of stands selling rau má (pennywort juice), nước mía (sugarcane juice), nước ép (fruit juice) and sinh tố (fruit shakes). The sinh tố was where things could get wild, making use of fruits as diverse as durian and jackfruit, mango, tomato, pineapple, squash, kumquat, soursop, avocado and sapodilla (a fruit I knew only as the Vietnamese 'sapoche' until this very second, when I looked up the English translation).
Keeping this in mind,
1. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Sinh tố
Making sinh tố is far from an exact science, and the proportions vary slightly by stand, but the recipe for a Vietnamese smoothie is, roughly, as follows:
Scoop edible portion of fruit into blender
Grab can of condensed milk; glop a ton of it into the blender on top of the fruit
Grab sugar jug and make it snow on top of the fruit and milk
Add ice
Blend
Even though I watched this process at least 50 times over my four weeks in Vietnam, and fully expected every time that my smoothie should taste like sugar and milk, it magically never did. It always tasted like someone liquefied and concentrated my favorite fruit and put it directly on my tongue. Durian shakes were appropriately stinky and retained a nice bit of custardy texture, while the jackfruit versions thankfully cut out their hint of slime. Avocado shakes made my American palate forget that avocados were meant for guacamole and savory dishes, not sweet ones (I told a smoothie-hawker once that Americans ate avocado only with salty things and she laughed so hard she knocked over a whole pineapple she was about to slice). I don't like sapodilla much, so it was entirely appropriate for me to think that the shake version tasted like rotten avocados.
Sinh tố was, if not the centerpiece of many photos, at least in the background, fueling the photographer.
 |
| Sinh tố in the southeast of the city |
 |
| Sinh tố at Chợ Lớn market |
 |
| Sitting behind a sinh tố stand in District 10 |
 |
| Sinh tố in Phnom Penh |
 |
| Where the Phnom Penh sinh tố came from |
Bánh mì (sandwich) shops are almost as omnipresent as sinh tố stands, but I was surprised to see them pop up from time to time in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian version, name unknown (as Khmer script is all loops to me) was half the size, coated with fiery red sauce and a heavy, pudding-like paté that tasted almost fermented, and had crunchy pork skins scattered across the top instead of head cheese.
3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: banana-filled rice
This five-cent snack came from a griddle full of its twins run by an old lady sitting across from the Chinese Embassy. Unadulterated, nothing but a grill-blackened pad of rice surrounding a lava-hot, sticky flow of ripe banana. I'm surprised the rest of the tropics haven't caught on!
4. Everywhere: Quail eggs
They come hardboiled; they come as balut. They come wrapped up pretty in little quail-egg-sized bags, tied with a ribbon. A ribbon! Inside the ten-egg packet is an even smaller packet of chili-spiced salt that is stapled closed. Their vendors cycle through the street and wend their way between tables at seafood, barbecue, and hotpot restaurants. I'd stop them on the sidewalk on my way home, hand them the equivalent of 25 cents, and go home with a bag of eggs to painstakingly peel and eat sprawled out on my hotel bed.
5. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Bánh chuối
Down the street from our last hotel was a tiny grocery which we never entered. We never entered it because its bakery was outside, and it had perfect round spheres of blackened banana pastry all ready for us to order from the sidewalk. The proprietor would slice a big fat triangle of jiggling cake-pudding hybrid into a plastic bag at night, and it would warm to breakfast temperature in the hot room by morning.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Frogs in Vietnam, frogs in Cambodia
I. Frogs in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City)
In District 1, just to the northwest of the Phạm Ngũ Lão backpacker district, a sign shouted, "CHÁO ẾCH SINGAPORE!" at me from across the street.
"Singaporean frog porridge?" I said to Julian with a question mark in my voice, like he would know, Frog porridge didn't sound familiar. I thought it was more probable that I was getting my diacriticals mixed up, like always.
But I was pretty sure, at least, that the sign didn't say "hello frog" (chào ếch), so we went in and sat down.
Yep, frog porridge! Or rather, frog hot pot with a bowl of porridge on the side.
Beyond the cliché "it tastes like chicken!" I never heard much of a description of frog meat before I ate it on this trip. I had no idea what to expect.
Allow me to elaborate: it does taste like chicken. It tastes like chicken that's been crossed with eel. And it's slippery and tender and encircled with tiny veins that look like tiny rubber bands holding the meat on the bone.
This particular frog was chopped up and marinated in a thick, syrupy sweet soy sauce that dripped tendrils into the porridge like honey into Cream of Wheat when I mixed the bowls together.
---
II. Frogs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
The frogs in Vietnam were relatively unadorned, and retained enough of their original shape, texture and flavor that they were unmistakably frogs. The Cambodian dish, on the contrary, was so heavily stir-fried and coated in all sorts of spices that the meat serving as a vehicle for all that spice was practically irrelevant. Tiny bones flexed and crunched, but that was the only clue.
In a raucous outdoor restaurant that had only beer and Fanta as refreshment options, I ordered something called 'Hot fried with frog', knowing it could be absolutely anything.
In District 1, just to the northwest of the Phạm Ngũ Lão backpacker district, a sign shouted, "CHÁO ẾCH SINGAPORE!" at me from across the street.
"Singaporean frog porridge?" I said to Julian with a question mark in my voice, like he would know, Frog porridge didn't sound familiar. I thought it was more probable that I was getting my diacriticals mixed up, like always.
But I was pretty sure, at least, that the sign didn't say "hello frog" (chào ếch), so we went in and sat down.
Yep, frog porridge! Or rather, frog hot pot with a bowl of porridge on the side.
Beyond the cliché "it tastes like chicken!" I never heard much of a description of frog meat before I ate it on this trip. I had no idea what to expect.
Allow me to elaborate: it does taste like chicken. It tastes like chicken that's been crossed with eel. And it's slippery and tender and encircled with tiny veins that look like tiny rubber bands holding the meat on the bone.
This particular frog was chopped up and marinated in a thick, syrupy sweet soy sauce that dripped tendrils into the porridge like honey into Cream of Wheat when I mixed the bowls together.
---
II. Frogs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
The frogs in Vietnam were relatively unadorned, and retained enough of their original shape, texture and flavor that they were unmistakably frogs. The Cambodian dish, on the contrary, was so heavily stir-fried and coated in all sorts of spices that the meat serving as a vehicle for all that spice was practically irrelevant. Tiny bones flexed and crunched, but that was the only clue.
In a raucous outdoor restaurant that had only beer and Fanta as refreshment options, I ordered something called 'Hot fried with frog', knowing it could be absolutely anything.
Like most of the mystery Cambodian stir fries I had, it came out liberally coated in lemongrass, an assortment of green leaves and herbs, and wildly spicy red chili specks. This was the better frog dish by far. It had a bar wings sort of feel, a carefree application of flavor, made to meld with alcohol. I came very close to wishing I was a drinker.
Instead, we managed to flag down a wandering vendor who was studiously ignoring the table of foreigners and got him to sell me a baggie of hardboiled quail eggs. Dragged through the tamarind sauce Julian had on his boring vegetarian noodles, they were the perfect accompaniment.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Crabs in China, crabs in Cambodia
I. Crabs in China (Ruili, Yunnan)
Our first view of Ruili's night market came through waves of rain, crashing down from the sky like we were walking under the world's biggest waterfall. The streets quickly flooded and became streams. We crossed several in water up to mid-calf.
When we got to the market, it was ghostly. Tarps rattled in the wind, covering deserted stalls. The stalls were filled with coolers, which were empty and draped in cloth and cardboard. Only a few places were open. In one, one drenched diner sat, bedraggledly sipping a papaya smoothie.
We tried again a week later after a scorching day spent on the Burmese border, watching villagers traverse the tiny border river using unofficial makeshift bamboo bridges or merely wading with their pant legs rolled up. I wanted to find crab to eat; we'd seen rows and rows of workers packing their little silvery blue bodies up into crates bound for the rest of Yunnan.
The night was clear and the market was hopping. Vendors jostled for space at the edges of a massive inner dining area, their carts all identically piled with skewered meat, snails, crabs, crickets, worms, and baby bees.
I wasn't that hungry, because, as I recall, I had had about 40 pork and green onion dumplings for lunch, but the night market vendors only sold their merchandise in one size: gigantic-Chinese-family-sharing-size, for 50 kuai (~$8.25).
Julian, of course, refused to eat any of the creatures on offer, so he was tasked with trying to convince the vendors to give me a smaller portion at a smaller price. Some were mildly amused by the question (in a why-would-I-even-entertain-that sort of way), and some were offended by it (in a you-want-less-of-my-delicious-food?!?! kind of way).
One, though, didn't understand the question, or else didn't care. "40 kuai," she said with a shrug and a take-it-or-leave it flip of her wok-stirring spatula. As a normally utterly ineffective bargainer, I was shocked but pleased by this turn of events: an unintentional bargain!
As the dish was set in front of me and I smelled the garlic and chilies wafting up into the air, all my hunger came rushing back somehow. The dumplings, though still digesting, became a distant memory, as though I had eaten them in a dream. It was a good thing I hadn't gotten a half-order. I ate every last claw.
The crabs' sauce was so dark and thick it was tough to distinguish the basil leaves from the undercurrent of pounded chilies. At first I tried to dig the meat out with chopsticks, but quickly came to realize it was a futile endeavor. I pulled a rubber band from my pocket, tied my hair back, pushed wayward strands behind my ear, and dug into the bowl with both bare hands like the sauced-up and hot-oiled crab bodies and claws were nothing more than a bowl of jelly beans.
Before long, I couldn't pick up my drink without it slipping right out of my absolutely sauce-coated hands. I dug my fingers under carapaces and wormed my way into tiny claw crevices. I scraped claw adductors with my teeth and smeared my cheeks trying to get my tongue all the way into some of the spaces between organs.
The garlic had been stir-fried so thoroughly that it could be eaten in chunks right along with the crabmeat, which was good since they were indistinguishable in color. The chilies' flavor had seeped into everything so thoroughly that eating them directly had no spicy effect beyond the effect of the rest of the dish, which was very hot. At first, my tongue delightedly bounced from garlic to ocean to spicy to herby and back, but before long it started tingling and burning them all together.
On the way out, we told the crabs' cook that her work had been amazing. She barely nodded as she kept stirring someone else's eventual dinner in her wok; she knew.
---
II. Crabs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
Khmer cuisine is one of those cuisines that hasn't been widely exported to the U.S. Last year, I was persistent enough to ferret out a few places in Long Beach, but apart from those tastes, I had no idea what to expect when I found myself on a bus to Phnom Penh earlier this week.
Luckily, Cambodia and Vietnam share the custom of, at nightfall, dragging out hundreds of plastic chairs and tables along with countless tanks of fresh shellfish. They do this in front of places that remained shuttered and gated all day. A place that was fixing motorbikes at noon might be tossing sea snails with lemongrass at nine. And language barriers can't stop me from recognizing those telltale shells.
There was one such place right down the street from our hostel. It was called the Oyster House. They had a simple one page menu largely consisting of English translations that left a lot to the imagination. This wasn't unusual in Phnom Penh, a capital with a much higher general English level than Ho Chi Minh City - enough English to have translations, not enough English to have detailed translations. One restaurant, for example, listed a particular soup as 'Khmer spice soup' and what came out was full of pumpkins, wintermelon, green beans, eggplant, and cucumbers.
My crab dish was an exception, though - it was called "Shake Sea Crab with Salt and Chili".
Which is exactly what it was.
It came out unadorned with any sort of silverware altogether, which confused me for a good minute. My stomach was rumblings and I couldn't get any meat out! Was I supposed to scrape the brain meat with my fingers and then stare at the legs wistfully?
No: I watched the locals. They were cracking the legs with their teeth.
Despite knowing my dentist would wince if she saw me, and despite the fact that some of the legs were spiky, I did the same. The crabs were small, about the same size as my palm. Their open heads were full of potent pepper seeds and sea salt; the legs were grilled until they could almost be crunched like BBQ flavored potato chips. To get the tiny wedges of meat out of their skinny limbs was like performing hand surgery, but ultimately worth it. The seasoning was simple, but the crabs were effortlessly, lightly fresh, the kind of fresh you only get in the States by paying over $30 per head or by going out in a boat yourself. Getting them for $1.50 was an experience I knew I shouldn't take for granted.
But they were tiny... so I couldn't help ordering some of the restaurant's namesake afterwards.
Our first view of Ruili's night market came through waves of rain, crashing down from the sky like we were walking under the world's biggest waterfall. The streets quickly flooded and became streams. We crossed several in water up to mid-calf.
When we got to the market, it was ghostly. Tarps rattled in the wind, covering deserted stalls. The stalls were filled with coolers, which were empty and draped in cloth and cardboard. Only a few places were open. In one, one drenched diner sat, bedraggledly sipping a papaya smoothie.
We tried again a week later after a scorching day spent on the Burmese border, watching villagers traverse the tiny border river using unofficial makeshift bamboo bridges or merely wading with their pant legs rolled up. I wanted to find crab to eat; we'd seen rows and rows of workers packing their little silvery blue bodies up into crates bound for the rest of Yunnan.
The night was clear and the market was hopping. Vendors jostled for space at the edges of a massive inner dining area, their carts all identically piled with skewered meat, snails, crabs, crickets, worms, and baby bees.
 |
| View from inside the covered area, with a solid border of stalls |
Julian, of course, refused to eat any of the creatures on offer, so he was tasked with trying to convince the vendors to give me a smaller portion at a smaller price. Some were mildly amused by the question (in a why-would-I-even-entertain-that sort of way), and some were offended by it (in a you-want-less-of-my-delicious-food?!?! kind of way).
One, though, didn't understand the question, or else didn't care. "40 kuai," she said with a shrug and a take-it-or-leave it flip of her wok-stirring spatula. As a normally utterly ineffective bargainer, I was shocked but pleased by this turn of events: an unintentional bargain!
 |
| Chopped crabs, passion fruit juice, mango shake |
The crabs' sauce was so dark and thick it was tough to distinguish the basil leaves from the undercurrent of pounded chilies. At first I tried to dig the meat out with chopsticks, but quickly came to realize it was a futile endeavor. I pulled a rubber band from my pocket, tied my hair back, pushed wayward strands behind my ear, and dug into the bowl with both bare hands like the sauced-up and hot-oiled crab bodies and claws were nothing more than a bowl of jelly beans.
Before long, I couldn't pick up my drink without it slipping right out of my absolutely sauce-coated hands. I dug my fingers under carapaces and wormed my way into tiny claw crevices. I scraped claw adductors with my teeth and smeared my cheeks trying to get my tongue all the way into some of the spaces between organs.
The garlic had been stir-fried so thoroughly that it could be eaten in chunks right along with the crabmeat, which was good since they were indistinguishable in color. The chilies' flavor had seeped into everything so thoroughly that eating them directly had no spicy effect beyond the effect of the rest of the dish, which was very hot. At first, my tongue delightedly bounced from garlic to ocean to spicy to herby and back, but before long it started tingling and burning them all together.
On the way out, we told the crabs' cook that her work had been amazing. She barely nodded as she kept stirring someone else's eventual dinner in her wok; she knew.
---
II. Crabs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
Khmer cuisine is one of those cuisines that hasn't been widely exported to the U.S. Last year, I was persistent enough to ferret out a few places in Long Beach, but apart from those tastes, I had no idea what to expect when I found myself on a bus to Phnom Penh earlier this week.
Luckily, Cambodia and Vietnam share the custom of, at nightfall, dragging out hundreds of plastic chairs and tables along with countless tanks of fresh shellfish. They do this in front of places that remained shuttered and gated all day. A place that was fixing motorbikes at noon might be tossing sea snails with lemongrass at nine. And language barriers can't stop me from recognizing those telltale shells.
There was one such place right down the street from our hostel. It was called the Oyster House. They had a simple one page menu largely consisting of English translations that left a lot to the imagination. This wasn't unusual in Phnom Penh, a capital with a much higher general English level than Ho Chi Minh City - enough English to have translations, not enough English to have detailed translations. One restaurant, for example, listed a particular soup as 'Khmer spice soup' and what came out was full of pumpkins, wintermelon, green beans, eggplant, and cucumbers.
My crab dish was an exception, though - it was called "Shake Sea Crab with Salt and Chili".
Which is exactly what it was.
It came out unadorned with any sort of silverware altogether, which confused me for a good minute. My stomach was rumblings and I couldn't get any meat out! Was I supposed to scrape the brain meat with my fingers and then stare at the legs wistfully?
No: I watched the locals. They were cracking the legs with their teeth.
Despite knowing my dentist would wince if she saw me, and despite the fact that some of the legs were spiky, I did the same. The crabs were small, about the same size as my palm. Their open heads were full of potent pepper seeds and sea salt; the legs were grilled until they could almost be crunched like BBQ flavored potato chips. To get the tiny wedges of meat out of their skinny limbs was like performing hand surgery, but ultimately worth it. The seasoning was simple, but the crabs were effortlessly, lightly fresh, the kind of fresh you only get in the States by paying over $30 per head or by going out in a boat yourself. Getting them for $1.50 was an experience I knew I shouldn't take for granted.
But they were tiny... so I couldn't help ordering some of the restaurant's namesake afterwards.
.JPG) |
| Grilled oysters! |
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